


What Water Tastes Like

by a_gay_poster



Category: Naruto
Genre: (And Miscommunication), Communication, Cultural exchange, Established Relationship, Gaara's Love Letter to the Desert, M/M, OCs (Original Camels)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-15
Updated: 2020-11-15
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:02:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,944
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27580421
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_gay_poster/pseuds/a_gay_poster
Summary: Deep in the Demon Desert lies a jealously guarded secret, unspoken and untouched. Now Gaara intends to share it with Lee.
Relationships: Gaara/Rock Lee
Comments: 20
Kudos: 129





	What Water Tastes Like

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ayumilovesstars](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ayumilovesstars/gifts).



> Happy (very belated) birthday, Ayu! Thank you so much for your constant cheer and wonderful cultural resources. You are such a kind and genuine person, and it has been an honor to get to know you! I hoped to have this done by the 13th, so it would only be a month late, but time unfortunately slipped by me. I hope I did justice to your idea!
> 
> There are no particular warnings for this story, but the Demon Desert and its cultural elements are based not on one particular desert, but rather a bunch of different deserts. I basically sat down and marathoned a bunch of desert documentaries before I wrote this, so don't take anything in here as necessarily accurate or reflective of a particular culture. This story contains **spoilers** for the 2nd Chuunin Exams filler arc. Thanks to the members of the GaaLee Discord for helping me name the camels!

_Telling someone why you love them is like explaining what water tastes like._

* * *

* * *

“So, what do you think?” Gaara gestured broadly at the expanse of dune they’d just crested.

“Um!” Lee made a rather loud throat-clearing noise, straightening up in his camel’s saddle, dark eyes darting. He was usually easy to read, but with the tagelmust wrapped around his brow and mouth to keep the sand out, he was less like an open book and more like a glimpse of a scroll in a language Gaara was not yet conversational in. “It’s … certainly a lot of sand!” 

He glanced sidelong at Gaara, his gaze searching. Gaara was sure his own cloth-wrapped expression revealed even less of his expectations. 

“I’m sure it looks beautiful at sunset!” Lee chirped, trying to catch Gaara’s eye. 

Gaara gave a little kick of his heels, urging his camel down the next slope of the dunes. Behind him, the grunts and calls of Lee struggling to get his camel walking again were soon lost to the wind.

It wasn’t that Lee was wrong—the dunes were indeed beautiful at sunset, gold-rimmed and sparkling against the satsuma skin of the evening sky—but he was missing the point. The desert was beautiful _right now_ , even at the hottest point of midday, when the sun pierced down like a branding iron and the shadows of the camels and their riders shrunk to mere specks on the sand. Every crag of stone, every strewn rock, every scrub brush and hollowed dune face and sand-swept valley … all of it, _all of it_ was beautiful. The desert was harsh and unforgiving, yes, but it was also a landscape that only permitted the existence of those who proved themselves its equal. It was neither as crowded nor as lush as Konoha’s forests, but in that sparseness was an elegant simplicity, a carefully perfected balance. Gaara breathed in and, over the stale of his exhalations tangled in the fabric across his nose, he smelled _home_. 

He only wished Lee could see what he saw. 

It had been hard enough to convince Lee to even come with him on this trek. Lee was generally willing to do most things Gaara asked of him, but when he got a thorn in his side about something, he could be even more stubborn than the camel he still hadn’t yet convinced to descend the hill. 

“I’ve been to the Demon Desert before, Gaara,” he’d said, when Gaara had first proposed their little solo sojourn.

Gaara had stared at him over the rim of his teacup. There was a little chip on the opposite side, and through it he had seen the button of Lee’s nose wrinkling in confusion, the little downturned moue of his lips. 

“How much of it did you actually see,” Gaara had asked, “and how much of it did you cross blindly in that tortoise shell your teammate brought?” 

“Hey!” Lee’s face had gone instantly and incandescently red, just as Gaara had predicted it would. “How did you even know about that?”

Gaara had just tapped his left eye, a reminder of the jutsu that allowed him to observe any part of his desert. 

He’d hoped then that Lee would warm up to the idea of a private adventure. Lee had always been something of an adrenaline junkie when left to his own devices, always seeking new ways to push his body, new challenges he could face down. But as the day of their departure grew closer, Lee’s hesitance had only seemed to grow. 

“And your ANBU _really_ aren’t coming? No guard at all?” 

Gaara had grunted irritably the fifth time this question was asked, staring down into the low trough he’d been using for repotting and dropping a gloveful of soil in there with a cloud of debris. Most of the dust had floated down and landed on the front of Lee’s jumpsuit. 

“You think me incapable.” Gaara had been unable to keep his nostrils from flaring, flurries of irritated topsoil making eddies in the trough’s surface. “I assure you I’ve not gotten soft.” 

The personal guard that had dogged Gaara’s every step for more than a decade were really more a formality. A high-status appointment, to be sure, but also a rather unexciting one. Suna’s Kazekage was a force of nature unto himself, and it was rare his guard had the chance to dispatch any enemy before he took care of matters by his own devices. 

“That’s not it at all!” Lee’s chest had puffed like the frill of a lizard. “It’s just … won’t it be dangerous?” 

Gaara had thought Lee _liked_ danger. Thrived off it even. Hadn’t that been why he picked Gaara, of all people, to form his closest bond with? Was that not why Lee had crossed the desert and abandoned his home to live in a foreign nation, under the constant threat of coups and assassination attempts, dodging wicked gossip and court politics like thrown kunai at even the most casual of social gatherings? Was that not why he dared to breach the isolation of Gaara’s demons, again and again, in exchange for nothing but the inadequate affections Gaara could show him? Did it not all come down to the excitement of the risk?

“You’ll be there to help me if anything goes wrong,” Gaara had said, biting his tongue against the accusation. 

“But—” Lee had deflated slightly, his voice going small. “... What if I’m not enough?” 

“I trust you with my life,” had been Gaara’s reply, turning his attention back to his soil. He’d smoothed it down, letting the soft texture and slight coolness through the canvas of his gloves soothe him. 

That much should have been obvious. There had never been anyone Gaara trusted the way he trusted Lee. No one who had ever taken his outstretched hand every single time he’d offered it. His brother and sister still shrunk from him at times, instinctively, if he spoke too harsh a word. Even Naruto had shrugged him off, once, in favor of Sasuke. 

There had never been anyone Gaara wanted to share this secret with, before Lee. 

But it appeared increasingly clear that Lee had very little interest in having it revealed to him. 

There was the galloping of hooves, and then Lee drew up short beside Gaara, panting as he rocked wildly in his saddle.

“I’m so sorry!” he shouted, which only served to make the animal thrash its head with more irritation. “I really don’t think he likes me very much!” 

“He probably doesn’t,” Gaara muttered, unsure if Lee could hear him. “Camels hold grudges. Unlike you.” 

Gaara’s camel, meanwhile, turned her head to mouth at the hem of Lee’s pants. He’d finally succumbed to Gaara’s insistence that the jumpsuit would make for sweaty, uncomfortable, and impractical travel, and likely give him sand-rash besides. He was dressed instead in something closer to Sunan travel gear, loose pants and a short cloak flapping around his waist. 

They were still bright green, of course. Gaara couldn’t possibly have won _all_ battles.

Lee laughed softly and leaned down to stroke the camel between her nostrils. 

“Kusu is so sweet! I don’t know how I managed to get the mean one!” 

It was this very sweetness that seemed to have incited Lee’s camel’s ire. Kusu had taken an immediate shine to Lee, abandoning her mate to sidle up to him, batting her long lashes as Lee had blinked slowly in return. Her mate, Kaakiiro—which ended up being Lee’s to ride—had become instantly jealous. He had preened and tossed his head and stomped his hoof, snorting for his mate to return. And when none of that had worked, he had stalked over and hocked a gob of spit right at Lee’s face. 

Lee, of course, had noticed none of his Kaakiiro’s theatrics until it was too late. He’d been fully captivated by allowing Kusu to nibble alfalfa tenderly from his fingers. He had looked so stunned when it happened, wide-eyed and wiping sticky saliva off his face so that it dripped between his spread fingers, mouth agape. 

“What—? What did I do?” 

Gaara hadn’t had the heart to tell him that it was base animal possessiveness. It would only hurt him worse to realize he’d done nothing wrong at all. 

Maybe it was the eyelashes, Gaara thought to himself now, perhaps unkindly. Lee and the camels had that feature in common. Or maybe it was the way that all animals (save that single, irascible camel) seemed drawn to Lee’s gentleness. Even Gaara, the Beast of Suna, had fallen victim to it, sucked in and half-drowned by the way Lee smoothed all his rough edges like a rolling current over stone. Lee had a natural talent for soothing wild instincts with a hushed word and a soft touch or a well-timed treat.

Not that Gaara ever ate out of Lee’s hands.

Well, except for that once. 

“Please don’t run off away from me like that,” Lee said, once the animals were placated and they were walking once more in silence, Gaara ahead and Lee behind. “If something happened, I might not be able to reach you in time.”

“I wasn’t far.” Gaara glanced over his shoulder. Lee bobbed with every step the camel took, his motions awkward and unnatural. “You move quick.”

“I’m not exactly in my element out here!” Lee protested. “I’m much slower on the sand! And this guy—” Here he shook his reins, and Kaakiiro turned to show him a mouthful of teeth. “—has given me no end of trouble! It really would have been better if we’d just run.”

“You’re still grouchy because you had to leave your weights behind,” Gaara guessed. Of course, even the sturdiest of pack animals would have broken its back trying to carry Lee’s ankle weights. The argument surrounding their abandonment in their reinforced safe had been pitched, Lee insistent that he would be off-balance for a fight on the sand without them, but eventually concern for the camels’ safety had won out. Lee was soft-hearted, and his stubborn streak could be bent—if not broken—with the application of a little strategy to those weak points. 

“I feel naked without them,” Lee admitted. 

Gaara eyed Lee up and down, examining the linen and canvas that draped every inch of him save his eyes, which were shifting now, awkward and embarrassed. He supposed that for someone who was accustomed to being covered from the nape of his neck to the tips of his toes by his everyday wear, shedding even a single layer could feel revealing. 

“You have a funny definition of naked,” Gaara said, ignoring the way Lee’s brow furrowed and turning back to the long, empty stretch of desert ahead. “Besides, I wanted you to get the proper desert experience.” 

“The proper desert experience,” Lee repeated in a mutter. He probably meant for the wind to take those words, but they carried to Gaara’s ears loud and clear. 

Gaara kicked his heels once more, speeding his camel on and leaving Lee behind him with a, “Hey!”

* * *

It was nearing evening the next time Lee spoke, the setting sun reflecting off the sand like it was water, the earth rippling with gentle waves of gold. Their shadows stretched long behind them like the slow pursuit of hungry ghosts. In the distance, the dunes loomed like the backs of great slumbering beasts. 

“You know, it’s a lot more peaceful out here than I remember it being,” Lee commented, all cheer. When Gaara turned to him, his eyes were smiling, burning with the embers of the setting sun. It was as if he’d forgotten entirely Gaara’s earlier coarseness. “I thought for sure we’d have encountered a monster by now.” 

Gaara replied with a grunt and didn’t mention the hill of Dune Ants he’d caved in before they crossed the last ridge. 

Lee probably would have enjoyed the battle if the camels’ footfalls had made them swarm, but Gaara thought it unwise to risk it. For all of Lee’s worry, Gaara _did_ know how to take care of himself, and Lee besides. They were far from medical care, out here on their lonesome. Neither of them were particularly skilled medics. Lee could stitch a wound or splint a limb, but he had no chakra control to do proper healing. Whereas Gaara’s chakra, though impeccably controlled, was far better suited to maiming and killing; he’d never been able to so much as revive a lizard. And even if the two of them had survived the swarm unscathed, their rides would likely have been picked to the bone by the beasts’ claws and pincers, which would have made for a miserable trudge back to Suna. 

Besides, the ants’ guts had a tendency to splatter when they were dismembered, and their innards stank like root rot. 

Just past the horizon, Gaara could smell their destination—the loamy scent of damp earth and the crush of green and growing things carried by the wind—but it was quickly growing dark. The chill of night would be upon them soon. There was a patch of jagged sandstone nearby that would serve as an adequate windbreak, so Gaara pulled on Kusu’s reins and waited patiently as Lee’s mount trundled stubbornly past and had to be wheeled back around. 

“We’ll camp here for the night,” he announced. 

The ground was alternately too hard with stone and too soft with loose sand to drive in tent poles, so they lay heavy rocks in the corners of their tent to keep it from being blown away by the rising wind. 

One benefit of having Lee as a traveling companion was that all the heavy lifting was taken care of with disciplined efficiency and a beaming grin. The other was that Gaara got to watch him work. 

Gaara’s tasks were accomplished quickly enough, just the twitch of his fingers in an earth-style jutsu to bring up a spar of stone that the camels could be tied to before they bedded down. That done, he watched how the wind blew Lee’s thin clothing close against his body, showing just the barest hints of the muscle beneath as he heaved their packs down off the camels’ backs and arranged their quarters for the night. Lee bent to touch his toes and raised onto tiptoe to stretch out his back, groaning into the twist of his overworked muscles. Gaara thought briefly that, if people could _sense_ the feeling of being looked at, Lee’s body must have been echoing with the ache of Gaara’s hands all over him. 

There wasn’t enough scrub brush out here to make a proper fire. Even if there had been, desert flora tended to retain water even when it appeared dried out, making for poor kindling. So they made do with an oil-run camp stove, atop which Gaara heated a stack of flatbreads and a small container of leftover machboos he’d brought from home.

By the time they were done eating, Lee was shivering. 

“There’s blankets in the tent,” Gaara reminded him, toeing at Lee’s shaking thigh while he licked the last of the ashy grease off his fingers. 

“I’m f-f-fine!” Lee’s objection was made less convincing by the way his teeth chattered. 

“Go.” Gaara prodded him harder, though he doubted it caused Lee much discomfort. “I’ll take first watch.” 

Lee frowned at that. “But—” 

“Let me,” Gaara insisted. “You need your rest.” 

“So do you!” 

“Not like you do.” 

Lee opened his mouth to protest further, but his words were cut off by a massive yawn cracking his jaw. 

Gaara raised an eyebrow at him. 

“I’ll wrestle you for it,” he offered drily. “I might even win.” 

“Only because you fight dirty!” Lee laughed, clambering to his feet. 

“I merely use my opponents’ weaknesses to my advantage,” Gaara replied, settling back into the sand and adjusting it around him until it formed a comfortable pillow for his lower back. 

He was so preoccupied with arranging himself that he didn’t notice at first the way Lee froze right in front of him, halfway to the tent. 

“Ah, well,” Lee said, his voice pitched low and soft, “you are my greatest weakness, after all.”

Gaara’s eyes snapped to him. 

That wasn’t what he’d meant. He’d meant that … that he knew which spot between Lee’s ribs was the most ticklish, that Lee was tender-headed and tugging on a lock of hair would make him cry uncle far faster than a chokehold, that Lee would stop in the middle of just about _anything_ if Gaara surprised him with a kiss. He hadn’t meant _that_ at all. 

“I thought you knew.” Lee cocked his head at an odd angle, dropping to a crouch and taking Gaara’s hands. His fingers were icy despite the bandages. He was frowning once more, deeper this time. Their little fire had burnt out, and all that was left to see in the smoky air was the black of Lee’s eyes, how they reflected the stars twisting overhead. 

Gaara did know. He _had known_ , he’d always known, ever since the weekslong mission years ago where Lee, drunk on sleep-deprivation, had pressed a gentle kiss to the back of his knuckles and promised to protect Gaara with his life. Maybe even before then, when they’d fought back-to-back against a horde of enemies so vast the edges of their ranks could hardly be seen. Or before even that, when they’d awoken at once from an infinite dream only to lock eyes; or when Gaara’s sand had carried Lee off a battlefield like a part of his own body; or when Gaara had rushed headlong to face down a man who used his body as a weapon even more efficiently than Lee did in Lee’s defense; or—

Gaara could waste the entire night trying to trace back their history, trying to pinpoint the exact instant when it became clear that there was a space in Lee’s heart the exact shape of Gaara’s wounded one, but the fact remained. Gaara didn’t like thinking about how that bond made Lee _vulnerable_. How strong and confident and self-assured Lee would willingly throw down his life in defense of Gaara’s. How someone could threaten Gaara, and Lee would jump to Gaara’s defense without thinking of his own. Without thinking about how losing him would _kill_ the very thing inside Gaara that made all the pain and fear worth it. 

That it would snuff out the love that had healed his wound of the heart.

A cold finger poked him in the nose. 

“Stop having dark thoughts.” Lee’s eyes were wrinkled half-closed from his grin, his teeth silvery like a crescent of moonlight. “I’ll let you take first watch. But you had better wake me up when it’s time to trade off. No martyrdom tonight, okay? Don’t let me sleep through it.” 

Gaara nodded his agreement, though they both knew it to be a lie. 

“I’ll bring you a blanket. It’s freezing out here.” 

Gaara had hardly noticed the cold himself, insulated by his racing thoughts and Lee’s proximity. But as Lee left to make rustling noises in the tent, a chill curl of breeze snuck between the layers of his clothing and made him shudder. 

Lee was back momentarily with something heavy to drape around Gaara’s shoulders, warm lips to press against the side of Gaara’s head. 

“Are you okay?” It was just a whisper in his ear, warm hands smoothing down his shoulders as he tucked the blanket closer around his chest. 

A ways distant, one of the camels let out a bellowing snore. 

“I’m fine. Go. Sleep.” 

“You’ll wake me if you need anything?” 

“What could I possibly need out here that I couldn’t get myself?” 

“I don’t know …” Lee hummed, pretending to think on it for a moment before wrapping his arms tightly around Gaara from behind. “Maybe a hug?” He craned around Gaara’s body to press his lips to the corner of Gaara’s chill mouth. “Maybe a kiss?” 

Gaara sighed, leaning back into the heat and firmness of Lee’s broad chest. 

“Yes, Lee, I’ll come wake you up if I need a hug or a kiss.” 

“Good!” Lee smacked his lips loudly once more against Gaara’s cheek. “And come get me if you see or hear anything odd. I’ll see you when you wake me up for second watch.” 

Gaara grunted his assent, and Lee slipped away like a shadow into the night. 

It wasn’t long before the desert went still once more, silent save the occasional lows of the camels and Lee’s restless thrashing in his bedroll. A night watch was rather pointless, all told, in this section of the Demon Desert. No human in their right mind would be out here at midnight, far from the amenities of civilization and prey to the wild creatures that stalked the dunes. 

Gaara supposed that excepted him and Lee from the count of the sane, but most would probably agree with that assessment. 

The creatures of the Demon Desert were no doubt dangerous—large and ferocious to be sure—but they were neither particularly smart nor particularly strategic. Truly, they had more to fear from Gaara than Gaara had to fear from them. 

And so the setting of the watch was little more than an excuse for distance. A chance for Gaara to focus and organize his thoughts, unencumbered by the needs of an animal or by Lee’s keen observation. 

He stretched his legs out in front of him. The muscles of his hips and thighs ached. Long hours swaying in the saddle had left him at once jelly-legged and stiff. The sand rearranged itself around him to make space for his curling toes and arching back as he lay back into its cradle. A slight exertion of chakra set it rumbling gently beneath him, like the very beginnings of a massage. 

Overhead, the stars wheeled in dense and milky clusters. The moon was out tonight, bright but not quite full, and the space around it in the sky was the blue of the bottom of ancient wells. Staring up into it, Gaara felt as though he were staring down one of those pitch holes, like he’d stepped right up to the edge of a foggara’s mother well and now it gaped beneath him, water rushing dark and tempting beneath him, gravity drawing it and him downhill for succor. 

He’d thought at the outset that Lee would enjoy this sort of thing—camping out, adventure under the stars, spending time together in perfect isolation. Getting dirty and sweaty and _bonding_ , the way he was always talking about. Gaara didn’t claim to understand much of what Lee said when he got well into his speeches about hot-bloodedness and self-rules and ever-escalating challenges, but he’d thought he’d understood _enough_. He thought he’d known, after all these years, at the very least the things that Lee _liked_. 

But maybe it wasn’t adventure that Lee was after, with Gaara. 

Maybe it was something else. Something Gaara hadn’t yet put his finger on. Maybe it was whatever it was that made his eyes soften like they had over the little camp stove, watching Gaara prod hot bread with his fingers and draw back when the tips scalded. Whatever it was that made him chase after Gaara doggedly no matter how many times he skittered away. Whatever it was that made him make whuffling noises in the dark, now, mumbling _Gaara_ in his sleep.

Gaara stood abruptly. 

He cast his sand in a loose circle around the tent, infused with chakra to detect any disturbance or intruder. Not that there was anything or anyone around. If there were, Gaara would have sensed them from miles away. 

The desert was utterly still but for the shifting of the sand. 

The advantage of sleeping out in the wilderness without a soul nearby was that there was no one to notice when Gaara abandoned his watch after mere hours and parted the tent flaps to slip inside. There was nobody to see him nestle into the bedroll beside a half-wakeful Lee, no one to hear the hiss Lee made when Gaara slipped cold fingers under the layers of his clothing to touch the bare skin of his stomach. Not a soul heard Lee’s sleep-muzzy, startled whispers or the rustle of bedclothes, nor saw the shaking of the tent’s canvas walls. 

No one but Gaara heard the noises Lee made minutes later, or cared that they carried on into the wee hours of the morning. 

Well, no one but Gaara and a pair of jealous, disgruntled camels.

* * *

“What’s that noise?” Lee whispered to the crown of Gaara’s sweaty head, hours later. It was barely dawn, but the sun was already baking the earth, the faint light through the thin white canvas hot and getting hotter. The tent had grown so warm with body heat that they’d cast all but the lightest blankets aside so they could lie sprawled, panting and sticky, atop one another. 

From outside the tent came a resonant sound, haunting and low. 

“The dunes are singing,” Gaara told Lee’s collarbone. 

“Singing?” 

Outside, the tones rose and fell with the shifting of the wind. 

“People say that it’s how djinn communicate with humans. They’re invisible, so you can’t see them, and they use the dunes to speak.” 

“Oh,” Lee said, very quietly. His heartbeat under Gaara’s ear was louder than anything in the world right now, its sound bigger than the wind’s hiss or the dunes’ song. “What are they saying?” 

“Nothing.” Gaara snorted. “It’s only a story. The sand is just so hot that it’s vibrating.” 

“I see …” Lee’s low voice was shaded dark with something like disappointment. 

“But—” Gaara propped himself up, poking the sweaty hollow between Lee’s bare abdominals. “If they _could_ speak, they’d probably say it’s time to stop being so lazy and get up. We’re wasting daylight.” 

Lee sprung up so quickly that Gaara was thrown from his body in an untidy heap. “Right! I wouldn’t want the djinn to get the wrong idea.”

Gaara rolled his eyes and tossed Lee his shalwar before he could stumble out into the desert bare-assed. 

Through the tent flap, Gaara watched Lee finish pulling on his shirt facing the horizon, the dips between his muscles shadowed like the ripples in the sand. In the distance, the dunes shed the ghosts of their topsoil to the windy sunrise. 

“I didn’t realize people lived out here,” Lee commented over their breakfast, the previous night’s rolled flatbread—which were still cold and slick with congealed oil—and bitter little cups of instant coffee. 

Gaara glanced up from repacking the camels’ side bags. “Nobody lives in the Demon Desert.” 

“Then who painted those?” Lee gestured with an elbow to the rocks that had served as their sparse protection from the night winds. 

The flat vertical planes of the tan stone were marked pink and copper with freeze frames of a bygone world, humanoid figures mid-leap, great horned mammals on stampede, caricatures of fire and sun. Gaara hadn’t noticed them when they’d made camp last night, but he recognized them instantly.

“Those are thousands of years old,” he said. 

The rocks had been adorned by long-vanished cultures, by the tribes that predated the shinobi villages by centuries, leaving their marks as they traversed the great span of the desert, adding to and compounding upon the great murals every time they passed. 

“They’re amazing,” Lee whispered, pressing his hand to a palm print in red and finding its fingers nearly the exact length of his own. “I can’t believe anyone ever lived here.” 

“The Demon Desert wasn’t always a desert.” Gaara finished cinching the last of the packs to the camels and stooped to grab a rock from the ground. “Years ago this was all grassland.” 

He held the stone out towards Lee, face-up so Lee could see the imprint in it.

“See?” 

“Wow …” Lee’s finger hesitantly traced the graceful whorl that a freshwater snails’ shell had left in the soft stone. “There was water here?”

“Mm.” Gaara folded Lee’s fingers around the little stone and stood to lead him to where the camels were impatiently waiting. “The gully we’ve been following used to be a riverbed. If you look carefully, you can find ancient fish bones and fern fossils.” 

He hopped easily onto Kusu’s back, and Lee followed the motion. 

“We won’t have time for that, though. Not if we want to make it while it’s still daylight. We’ll be traveling fast.” He kicked his heels, and Kusu set a quick pace with her plodding hooves. 

“Say, you never said _where_ it is that we’re going, exactly,” Lee called, muffled by the tagelmust he was wrapping sloppily around his mouth. 

“You’ll see soon enough,” Gaara replied, almost to himself, biting back the tiniest smile at Lee’s wide-eyed awe. “I wouldn’t want to ruin the surprise.”

* * *

They moved at a steady clip through the morning and into the afternoon, past humps of leathery welwitschia like tiny hillocks and termite cathedrals whose spires spiraled towards the sky. They traveled mostly in silence, punctuated only by Lee’s occasional barks of _What’s that?_ , which sounded less like the incredulous inquiries of their morning and more like a commander demanding an assessment of a threat. 

The tension only grew as they picked their way through a dense grove of butterpips, the sandy hummocks beneath their thorns teeming with carnivorous beetles the size of a man’s hand and the thrashing, spiked tails of the venomous lizards that sheltered there. Lee bit off an uncharacteristic yelp as Gaara’s camel neatly sidestepped a scorpion’s claw lashing from its burrow. 

“Easy there!” he cried, and bristled when Gaara just glanced over his shoulder and rolled his eyes at the dramatics. 

The first indication they were nearing their destination were the gaping mouths of the foggara’s vertical access shafts speckling their path. They grew denser the closer they got to the aquifer, tracing the veins of the lotus-leaf shape of the alluvial fan in the reverse of their spread to the far reaches of the desert villages. 

“What _are_ these things?” Lee asked in exasperation, as Kaakiiro once more very nearly tossed him off its back and into one of the plunging holes. 

“It’s for the irrigation system,” Gaara explained. “There’s water flowing through tunnels underground here. Those access shafts are how the workers get into the ground to dig the channels.”

“Wouldn’t it be faster to just bring shinobi out to do an earth-style?” 

“Yes, but then the walls would require a constant infusion of chakra to remain stable. If they’re made by hand, someone only needs to come out and inspect them for decay and debris every year or so.” 

“So, you’re actually working right now.” Lee’s voice raised over the wind, harsh with accusation. 

Gaara thinned his lips, glad that the thick scarf wrapped over his face hid the worst of his guilty expression from Lee’s prying eyes. 

“It’s merely a convenient coincidence.” 

“You really dragged me all the way out here— _alone_ , with no guard to protect you—so you could look at water pipes?” 

“No, I—”

There was a _poof_ of displaced sand as Lee dropped off Kaakiiro’s back, and in barely a moment, he was jogging easily aside Gaara’s animal at a slow clip, his fist tight around the reins in his hand. 

“You put yourself in _danger_ , with only me to watch your back, for the sake of _supervising a construction project?_ ” 

“No one comes out this far but me,” Gaara snapped. “I told you. There’s no risk out here I can’t handle.” 

Lee placed himself bodily in front of Gaara’s camel and stood stock-still, forcing Gaara to draw his mount up short. His eyes between the layers of the tagelmust were fierce, the effect only slightly diminished by Kusu nosing at his face, leaving silvery streaks of spit in the wake of her mouth. 

“And _I_ told _you_ that you can’t be sure of that!” Lee sniped back, jaw snapping like an adder’s and just as full of venom. 

“It wouldn’t be worth the risk to send any other shinobi out here,” Gaara replied, voice acidly calm. “I’m the one who can sense the movements of every living thing out here. I’m the one who would know if a sandstorm was coming.” 

“So you’re disposable, that’s what you’re saying?” 

“I’m saying there’s nothing to dispose of, because between you and I, there’s nothing in this desert that could match us.” 

Gaara’s fist clenched instinctively, the sand roiling in the gourd at his hip. Kaakiiro whuffed in alarm, prancing to the side and away from him, skittish. It was this, more than anything else, that gave Gaara pause.

He took a breath.

Lee’s scowl was obvious even through the scarf, standing tall and glowering up at Gaara like a one-man battlement. His brow was furrowed with frustration, his knuckles tense on the camel’s reins, but there was something else there, too, in Lee’s wide and watery eyes. Something that Gaara had been trained since his childhood to recognize. 

Fear. 

He was scaring Lee. 

Gaara slid sideways off his saddle and touched down upon the earth. The sand accepted him with grace, without the slightest cloud of debris, and even the wind whirling around them seemed to fall still. 

“Lee,” he said, raising a placating hand. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

“What?” Lee breathed. His eyes widened, and he blinked dust from his long lashes. His grip on the reins eased fractionally. “What are you talking about?” 

“I’m sorry for losing my temper,” Gaara said softly. He took a hesitant step closer, recalling Lee’s gentleness in soothing frightened wild animals. “I would never do anything to harm you.” 

“What—?” Lee’s brow crumpled once more, this time in confusion. “I didn’t think you were going to hurt me. I mean, I suppose you could if you really put your mind to it, but it would be a heck of a fight!” 

Now it was Gaara’s turn to be bewildered. “But you’re afraid.”

“Gaara,” Lee threw his arms wide, the suddenness of his gesture making Kaakiiro snort once more. “I’m afraid of something hurting _you_ , not you hurting me!” 

“Why?” 

“Why?” Lee’s eyes popped impossibly wider. “I’ve lived in Suna for two years, and all I’ve heard the entire time is people warning me never to set foot in the Demon Desert. I don’t know if you remember, but the last time we were out here together, I saw you nearly get your soul sucked out of your belly by a man with a panpipe!”

Gaara exhaled sharply. Lee was thinking of his second attempt at the chuunin exams, and the man who’d attempted to extract the tailed beasts of both Gaara and Fuu—may her memory be carried by the Wind—and had failed. Gaara could still feel the ache of his midline chakra point sometimes if he shifted the wrong way, but for the most part he had put the event out of his mind. The successful extraction of Shukaku had come soon after, and laid many larger problems upon his plate. 

“It was a biwa,” Gaara corrected him. 

“You are missing the point spectacularly.”

He was. He took another step towards Lee, reaching out to rest his hand on Lee’s arm, squeezing the muscle just above his elbow.

“That was under completely different circumstances,” he said, in what he hoped was a reassuring tone. “The exam’s heavy proctoring was the only reason anyone even thought they could _take_ a risk like going after me, because they knew they’d be rescued as presumed innocent exam participants if they failed. Any other time, coming out into the desert alone would have been a death sentence.”

Lee raised both bushy eyebrows until they disappeared behind the headwrap of his tagelmust. 

“The exam was in a completely different area,” Gaara hastened to add. “We would never allow chuunin in this part of the desert, much less genin doing rank-tests.” 

Lee looked down at the hand cupping his arm. 

“So it’s _more_ dangerous out here,” he said in that slow, teacherly voice Gaara most often heard him use on his students when explaining a very basic concept. “Not less.”

Gaara shook his head. “It’s neither. It’s simply … different. Different risks and different rewards.”

“How was I supposed to know that?” Lee’s eyes were trained on Gaara’s thumb making circles in the crook of his elbow. “It all looks exactly the same. It’s all just sand.” 

“It’s not all just sand,” Gaara rebutted. “That’s what I’ve been trying to show you this entire time. You’ve just been too worried about my—my putative _security_ to listen. Look around.” 

He squeezed Lee’s elbow tightly and spun him, gesturing with his free hand out to the desert around, the openings of the foggara’s access shafts like a line of ants guiding them onward, the humps of welwitschia like the brown and green backs of tortoises, the curling vines heavy with nara melons like the twined tails of a mating ball of snakes. All of it untouched save the irrigation holes, unwitnessed by anyone but the two of them. 

“I’ve made this journey by myself for years. No one but me knows that this place even exists,” Gaara said, mouth pressed close to Lee’s fabric-wrapped ear, so his meaning wouldn’t be lost to the wind. “I’ve never brought anyone out here before. I wouldn’t have even brought _you_ this time if I didn’t think you’d enjoy the challenge.”

“What do you mean? How can a whole part of a desert be kept a secret?” Lee whispered back, and Gaara only knew he spoke by the motions of his jaw, its hinge shifting against Gaara’s lips.

“By telling people that it’s extraordinarily risky, and that the only person who could survive it is demon-blooded himself.”

“This doesn’t make any sense!” Lee spun to face Gaara once more. “I feel like I can’t talk in this thing—” 

He ripped the tagelmust from his face only to be spattered with sand from a gust of wind. He wasted quite a few minutes hacking and clawing sand from his mouth before relenting and wrapping its long tail once more around his mouth. 

“Ugh.” He sighed, and Gaara sidled closer into the slump of his shoulders. “Let me try this again. Is it actually dangerous or isn’t it?”

“It’s dangerous,” Gaara affirmed. “But not more dangerous than I am.”

He looked out into the desert over Lee’s shoulder. The sun shone bright on the horizon, and the wind carried whispers of their destination just over the next ridge. 

“Who else would have survived out here long enough to dig those holes? My very first gift to Suna was this water.”

Suna’s freshly-anointed Demon Kazekage, renowned for his insatiable bloodlust, had brought water to the land like whispered prayers brought gold. Gaara still heard the rumors whispered—that this water, rich with iron, was the only thing that slaked his thirst for blood, or that he’d sold his spirit over in a blood pact for the aqueduct. Even the more pragmatic of the shinobi corps had been too awed or frightened to question Gaara’s appearance at that first council meeting, bearing the announcement of a mysterious new water source and a four-tiered irrigation plan. 

“I was the one who found the oasis,” Gaara hissed into Lee’s ear. 

He’d never spoken the secret aloud before. 

He’d been the only person to reach the oasis in decades, though many had died in search of it. Even now, its status was that of half-myth, half-jealously guarded treasure. 

“Oasis?” Lee’s jaw worked, the hints of a frown. “What oasis?” 

“There.” Gaara thrust one arm over Lee’s shoulder, pointing into the distance just as the mid-afternoon haze cleared in the wake of the wind, leaving the horizon shimmering. On it, the crenellated rooftops of the ksar that had stood empty for hundreds of years rose up, cast in shadow by the midday sun, guarding the oasis’ treasure from the outside world like a fortress. It was only the breeze that betrayed it, carrying notes of date palm and ripe olives. “That’s what I wanted you to see.”

Lee crumpling to his knees came as a surprise, how quickly he moved as he grabbed the hems of Gaara’s pantlegs and pressed his face to the sandy earth. 

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled.

Gaara knelt down in turn, grabbing Lee’s shoulders and shoving him upright—partly to be sure he’d heard him properly, and partly so that Lee wouldn’t burn his nose on the hot sand. 

“What did you say?” 

“I said I’m sorry,” Lee repeated, his eyes shimmering with tears too close to being shed. “I was just—I was concerned. I don’t want you to get hurt. I was so _worried_ , after last time … and I just—I wasn’t able to _help you_ before, and now—”

“No.” It was far too punishingly hot for an embrace just now, but Gaara dragged Lee into one anyway, crushing his face to the sweaty crook of Lee’s neck. He inhaled deeply, smelling _home_ of a different sort, a home that didn’t force him to prove himself, but rather accepted him with open arms, with hands that clutched fiercely at the back of his traveling cloak and whispered apologies that he didn’t truly deserve.. 

The words Gaara wanted to say were choked off by a feeling that poured right down his throat and filled him, like a crucible of molten aluminum sunk into a scorpions’ nest. 

“ _Yes_ ,” Lee hissed back, ferocious in his insistence. “You said it yourself, you know the desert better than anyone. I shouldn’t have doubted. I should have—” 

He shook his head once, abruptly, as if to clear it, and took a slow, shaky breath before climbing unsteadily to his feet. He extended a hand down for Gaara to take, hauling him up to standing. 

“It doesn’t matter,” he said, finally, his eyes moist at the corners but without any fallen tears caught in those long, long lashes. “I trust you. Please, show me what it is you wanted to show me.” 

Gaara did not relinquish Lee’s grasp, turning his hand instead until their fingers twisted together. He reached across Lee’s body and grabbed the reins of Lee’s neglected camel. 

“Let’s walk,” he offered, leading the camels with one hand and Lee with the other. 

It was but a small concession, their conversation yet unfinished. There were topics they had left unexplored, fears of Lee’s that Gaara had yet to plumb the depths of, instincts of Gaara’s he’d thought worn away by years of tenderness that still arose in response to the slightest pressure, like a trap sprung by a tripwire. But Gaara was content to let the matter rest for now. The sun was still using the desert as its personal clay oven, and they were still a ways off from the mud walls of the empty ksar and the shade of the date palms. 

Lee was quietly fascinated as they walked, side-by-side, along that last stretch of long-dried riverbed. His eyes crinkled in a smile at the blue-throated lizards that scurried over their toes, and he stepped very carefully over the curled fronds of a resurrection plant at Gaara’s instruction, cautious not to crush its fragile leaves.

“It looks like a castle,” he whispered, as they approached the hard-packed mud walls of the ksar. From the outside, the whole structure was rather unimpressive—plain brick the same color as the desert surrounding it, the only distinguishing features its small, high windows outlined in whitewashed stone, where long ago faces must have peered out in search of intruders such as they were. 

“It was more like a granary.” Gaara showed him through the narrow entrance. “Each family that lived here would have had several storage rooms. It’s ingenious, really. Grain can keep in here for months. We use similar construction methods even now in Suna, to keep things cool and dry.” 

Just within the entrance, Lee came to a complete halt, staring upwards. Rising above them were storeys upon storeys of wooden doors painted a dizzying myriad of colors: bright teal blues and sunshine yellows and ochre reds, all outlined with that same whitewashed stone. Many of them were now in disrepair, hanging loose on stone hinges or with the boards rotted away, but their colors were as vibrant as Gaara imagined they must have been when his place had been populated. 

“Do you want to see inside one?” 

Lee nodded hurriedly. Gaara trailed his hand along the wall until he came to a foothold that seemed sturdy enough. The slung reed walkways that would have once served as the staircases of this place had long since rotted away, but the stone and wooden spurs that braced them to the walls still remained. 

Gaara cupped his hand around one tiny outcropping and began to climb, calling over his shoulder, “Follow me. And watch your step.” 

The use of chakra would have made the climb simple, but Lee had no such conveniences, so Gaara forewent it for practicality’s sake. Without testing the handholds himself, he couldn’t know if they were sturdy enough to prevent Lee from falling to the ground below. Lee’s little exertional grunts followed him up as they scaled the wall. 

At the highest storey, Gaara ducked through a dark and doorless aperture, beckoning behind him for Lee to come in. The found themselves sprawled and panting in a cool and shadowy hallway, damp with the smell of mildew.

“Everything looks so small,” Lee exclaimed, poking his head over the lip of the door to stare down at the camels milling in the stone courtyard beneath them. 

“We’re not nearly as high up as the top of the Hokage monument, and you climb that all the time.” 

Lee kicked his feet, looking very much like a child. 

“I know,” he said, “but this feels different, somehow.” 

“Come on.” Gaara prodded at the sole of Lee’s foot with his toes.

Lightning was the most challenging of his chakra natures to access, but Gaara focused now on gathering a small lightning style in his palm, just enough to barely illuminate the dark chamber. Shadows leapt and danced in the light’s wake, making the whole space shimmer like the bottom of a tidepool. 

There were signs of life long-abandoned in the dim, cramped little rooms that branched off from the low-ceilinged hall. Thumbprints in the mud brick where a seam had once been smoothed. Raised patterns beside the doorways where extra material had been packed on to symbolize an abundant harvest. Tracks in the stone floor worn down by years of passing footprints. 

“There isn’t much to see in here,” Gaara said, gesturing around one empty room. The pitiful light crackling in his hand revealed heaps of sand that had been carried through the door by the wind to rest in the corners and little else. 

“Are you kidding?” Lee was trailing his fingers through tracks dug low in one wall, a child’s idle graffiti perhaps, or the remnants of the builder’s name. “This is incredible. When was the last time people lived here?” 

“Nobody really lived in these rooms,” Gaara corrected him. “This was storage space … and a means of protecting the oasis. People’s actual homes would have been inside the wall, closer to the water.” 

“Are they still there? The houses, I mean?” 

Gaara shook his head. 

“They were buried by the sand a long time ago.”

The only evidence Gaara had ever found of life outside the ksar were mere traces. Shards of crockery or the ancient burnt bones of cooked fish. A leather sandal, once, which had crumbled to dust the moment he’d touched it. Gaara knew very little of the ways of the people who once lived here. They kept few records in writing save the notations of their grain stores on the ksar’s inner walls—long marks for millet and short hashes for barley. And their oral traditions had been mostly lost in their exodus, as the green places they had once dwelt withered and shrunk to nearly nothing, driving them out into the desert and transforming this place into the setting of a child’s bedtime story, mere myth or fairytale. 

But Gaara had spent so many lonely hours here—when he’d wandered the desert as an unsupervised child—that at times he swore he could sense the oasis’ former inhabitants in the relics they’d left behind. It was as though he could feel the clutch of a calloused hand in the fingerprints on a mud brick or see the strength of a muscled arm pressing olives for oil in the basin of a cracked mortar. 

Their lives touched him, but he could never touch them. Could never harm them. This place held for Gaara a more profound peace than any memorial stone or house of prayer, an ache of tragedy stripped of the sick swell of guilt. Gaara found refuge here, among the ghosts. 

“You know, Tenten has an archaeologist friend who would be absolutely over the moon to get a chance to dig this place up,” Lee commented as they climbed back down to where the camels were waiting for them. 

“No one can know it exists,” Gaara reminded him. 

“Of course!” Lee’s posture snapped upright and he seemed halfway to a salute as he fell into step behind Gaara. 

“What’s within these walls is perhaps one of Suna’s most valuable resources.”

“Right!” 

The wall within the confines of the ksar was more roughly hewn than the smooth daubed surround that guarded it. It appeared more hastily constructed, the joists between its stones sloppily mud-plastered and gapping, as if it had been erected in a last-ditch effort to keep intruders out … or to keep the oasis’ bounty in. Gaara scanned it briefly, then moved towards the patch of stone that was just slightly off-color from the rest. A press of his palms and a slight exertion of chakra sent it sinking below the surface of the earth. The ground shuddered and groaned, unleashing a massive cloud of sand and dust. 

“Word of its existence being leaked to a foreign power—even an ally—could be disastrous.” 

“Your secret is safe with me,” Lee recited dutifully. 

It was a few moments before the dust cleared. 

Lee let out a gasp. 

“Is that … real?” 

Stepping from the desert’s piercing heat to the oasis’ shade was like crossing the border into another world. The long fronds of date palms made a canopy above their heads, turning the world within into a lush, green twilight. The shrubby trunks of olive trees twisted alongside the sand-strewn path, their branches heavy with the swellings of green fruits just beginning to ripen into brown. Apricots hung like satchels of gold from bowing boughs, forming a sweet-scented arbor. The high walls blocked the worst of the wind, and thick grasses swayed in the gentle breeze left behind, their hush barely audible over the plinking melody of water spilling over stone and into a deep pool. 

Lee took a few faltering steps forward, Kaakiiro’s reins falling from his limp grasp. His fingers fumbled for the ends of his tagelmust, finally unwrapping it and casting it aside. Gaara undid his scarf with a fraction more grace, and the two of them took a deep, simultaneous breath. 

The air was honey-sweet, faintly humid like nowhere else within Wind Country’s borders. The smell of it clung evergreen-heavy to Gaara’s tongue. 

The deep pool that dominated the center of the oasis was nearly jade from the mirror image of the plantlife overhead and all around. A faint mist spilled off its surface and curled foggy tendrils around their ankles. 

Lee reached for it as if in a daze, blinking hard like he was dispelling a mirage. 

“It’s _beautiful,_ ” he breathed, his eyes as round as watering holes and deeper than aquifers, reflecting the shimmering light off the water like the cabochon of a rare gem. 

_There it is,_ Gaara thought, with a pleased sigh so heavy it nearly took his soul with it. _Finally._

He wasn’t looking at the flora or the little waterfall when he agreed, “Yes. Beautiful.” 

“I just can’t believe this is real.” Lee touched the leaves of a mint plant with something approaching reverence, then pulled his fingers back to stare at the dew that clung there. 

It was hard to look at him in that moment, with the raw joy and wonder bubbling childlike from within him. It hurt like staring too long at the sun. 

Gaara turned away to retrieve their water skins and the camels’ basin. 

“You should go for a swim,” he suggested over his shoulder. “You’re hot, aren’t you?” 

“Oh, no,” Lee demurred. “I’m just fine.” 

“The back of your neck says otherwise.” Gaara trailed a finger along the slick and heated skin as he passed. 

“But I didn’t bring any swimming clothes.” 

Gaara shrugged, the empty canteens in his hands clattering. “So go naked.” 

Lee’s face went red in a way that had nothing to do with the ambient temperature of the air, warm even in the shade. 

“O-okay.” Lee tugged his cloak off over his head. His shirt followed quickly, exposing golden lines of lean muscle. “Are you sure it’s all right?” 

Gaara only realized he was biting his lip when the skin began to sting. 

“Hm?” 

“I mean, if people use this as drinking water—” Lee was already toeing off his shoes, wiggling his feet in the sandy earth.

“It’s all purified first.” 

It was an effort to tear himself away. Gaara walked a ways down the pool’s shore and stooped to refill first the canteens, then the much larger basin from the water that trickled over the stone in a small fall. 

“Go on,” he called. “I’ll join you in a minute.” 

Lee paused with a hand on his waistband, the hook of his bandaged thumb dragging the fabric down to expose the cut of one hipbone and the thickening trail of hair that descended from his navel. 

Gaara froze in turn to stare, heedless of the weight of the rapidly filling basin in his arms. The flush had spread down Lee’s neck to caress his collarbones, like spilled water pooling on dry earth. There were beads of sweat caught in the hair on Lee’s stomach, glittering like strewn pearls. 

Lee had always looked good in green, but he had never looked quite like he did now, surrounded by waxen leaves like a bed ready to swallow him, mist swirling gently around muscled calves, his skin aglow from the dappled light that pattered through the canopy.

The thumb on his waistband inched lower, exposing more warmly hued skin by degrees. So slowly it was almost teasing. The air between them sizzled with electricity, like the empty space left behind after a chidori. 

Gaara licked his lips.

The water overflowed the sides of the basin with a loud splatter, breaking the spell. 

“Um!” Lee’s hand snapped to his side, posture straightening on the pike of his spine. “You’re … sure. There’s nobody around?” 

Gaara cast his chakra out into the sand. There was a family of spine-tailed lizards burrowed into the earth about five yards distant, a handful of small beetle and scorpion clutches buzzing with life, a nest of bunting up in one of the olive trees whose eggs were just shy of hatching. Everywhere, the earth teemed with life. But not a single chakra signature sang against his own. 

“Not for miles,” he confirmed. 

Lee grinned as he stripped his pants down, and Gaara had to cast his eyes to the ground so he could focus on the task at hand. 

Tending to their mounts had to come first. Then he could tend to Lee. 

Gaara knelt in front of the camels with the full water basin. Behind him, there was a whoop and a _pop_ of displaced air as Lee’s body took flight. 

“Drink,” he commanded. 

The camels blinked absently, their gazes instead shifting to the massive splash as Lee’s body hit the water. 

“Aah!” Lee’s shriek when his head broke the surface made Gaara turn. 

Gaara had neglected to mention that the low land, high bedrock, and ample shade here conspired to make the trapped remnants of ancient rainfall much colder than the scant, tepid groundwater Lee was accustomed to in Suna. 

“It’s freezing!” Lee shouted. 

“Sorry,” Gaara replied, not feeling especially guilty as Lee’s broad shoulders bobbed in the center of the pond. 

“I’ll just have to move around a bit to warm myself up!” 

Gaara cast one last glance at the camels. They were now gently bumping each other, side-by-side at the trough. Well, they would drink if they were thirsty, and they would ignore it if not. Either way, Gaara had more pressing matters to attend to.

Like one of Lee’s arms rising up from the water in a sparkling wave. 

Gaara bent to shed his boots and roll his trouser legs. 

He’d always enjoyed watching Lee swim. He himself didn’t particularly enjoy the activity—between his lack of physical strength and the clumsiness it conveyed to his sand, it made him feel more vulnerable than relaxed—but Lee in motion was always a joy. He gamboled in the water, slippery as a river otter and just as graceful, diving in and out of the gentle waves his body had created. The water glistened on his every muscle, turning his body to molten gold. 

Gaara eased himself down on the bank of the little pond and let his feet and ankles dangle into the coolness. 

Lee splashed his way over. 

“You’re not getting in?” 

“I’m fine,” Gaara said, as Lee wrapped chill hands around his ankles to anchor himself to the spot by the wall, legs kicking idly behind him to keep himself afloat. “It’s cold and wet in there.”

“I thought that was the point!” Lee’s smiling eyes danced with mischief, one hand sneaking further up Gaara’s calf to draw patterns in the hollow of his knee. “Once you swim around a little bit, it’s really not so bad.” 

“You know I don’t swim.” 

“I could help you.”

“No.” 

“Now you’re just being stubborn.” 

“And if I am?” 

Lee’s eyes flashed for just a second before his hands wrapped tight around Gaara’s legs. In an instant, he submerged, dragging Gaara down into the water with him. 

“Lee!” 

Gaara’s face broke the surface of the water with a furious gasp. His legs wheeled beneath him, but there was no need. Lee had his hands wrapped firmly around Gaara’s waist, keeping him from going under. Gaara shook his head hard, but Lee just grinned cheekily in response at the tiny rainstorm the soaking ends of Gaara’s hair bestowed upon his face. 

Clearly Lee had forgotten that Gaara had wind nature chakra, because he spluttered with startlement when Gaara used it to push the water up and over in a wave to douse Lee’s head. 

“That was a very risky move to use on the man keeping you afloat!” Lee blinked the water from his eyes and shimmied like a dog after a bath, but his hands didn’t lose their grip on Gaara. 

They had drifted a little in the aftermath of the chaos, the water slapping the shore rhythmically as the ripples faded. Now they were floating nearer to the center of the pond, and the distance between his toes and the sandy basin made Gaara wary. 

Still, he looked at Lee with challenge in his eyes and said, “So what are you going to do about it?” 

Lee laughed, and then he kissed him. 

It was just a few strokes of Lee’s long legs before they were back up against the bank of the pond, Gaara’s back pressed to the suck of the sand and Lee’s thumbs making circles in the hollows of his hips. Gaara snagged a leg around the back of Lee’s thigh and tugged him closer. The water’s chill had made Gaara break out in goosebumps, warm only in the places that Lee touched him. Which were increasingly many, as Lee deepened the kiss. 

“You are wearing far too many clothes for this,” Lee murmured to the seam of Gaara’s lips. 

Gaara bit him, hard enough to sting but not enough to break the skin. 

“ _Someone_ pulled me in here with all my clothes on,” he grumbled back. 

He palmed Lee’s chest, the cold little pebble of one nipple, wishing there was less than skin between them. Something dark and wanting rumbled within him. He wanted to steal his hands up under Lee’s ribs, to massage the tenderness of his pounding heart, right where he was warm and human, slippery and beating. 

Long, knobbly fingers made graceful work of Gaara’s sodden clothes, and finally they hit the bank with a _slap_. 

Lee drew back just long enough to breathe, looking down at Gaara with challenge in his eyes. 

“Is that so?” he whispered, the mirth on his face making a slow shift into wickedness. “Well whoever it was that ruined your clothes, you should punish him.”

* * *

“I still can’t believe no one comes out here,” Lee remarked some time later, lounging prone in a sunbeam with his face pillowed on his arms. “It’s just so peaceful.”

Gaara looked up from wringing water out of his trousers. One of his socks was still spinning idly under the waterfall, and he hadn’t yet decided how he would convince Lee to swim out and retrieve it. In a way, it was fortunate that it was his clothes that had gotten wet instead of Lee’s, because he could fit into Lee’s garments much more easily than Lee could fit into his. He was wearing Lee’s long shirt like a tunic, its hem nearly touching his shins. 

“Caravans use the ancient riverway as a trail occasionally,” he replied, “but not many would brave the Demon Desert without a heavy guard and plenty of insurance. Not even for a bit of shade and water.” 

“It’s more than _a bit!”_

Gaara hummed and approached Lee where he was spread out. The muscles of his back made rolling dunes of light and shadow, striated with scar tissue like dried riverbeds. Gaara stooped to run a finger down the valley of Lee’s spine, smiling as his own personal desert in miniature shivered in response to his touch. He wondered at the duality of a man who felt embarrassed to cross the sand without his leg weights, yet took no issue with splaying out like this for Gaara’s eyes alone. 

“You should get dressed,” he whispered, huffing breath across the hair drying in stiff peaks at the nape of Lee’s neck. “Or you’ll sunburn your ass.” 

Lee’s wrists muffled a groan as Gaara’s fingers trailed to the divots of his lower back. 

“Just five more minutes,” he stretched the words out into a whine. “It feels so nice.” 

Gaara snorted as he stood. He studied Lee’s lean form for one more long, affectionate moment. 

Then he dropped his still-damp clothes on Lee’s back in a heap.

“Hey!” Lee shouted, but he didn’t actually move to react. “What was that for?”

“If you’re going to take up all the sunshine, at least make yourself useful.” Gaara was grateful for the fact that Lee’s eyes were still closed; it allowed him to hide the flush of his cheeks and the twist of his mouth. “You got them wet, so you can be their drying rack.” 

“If you like.” Lee wriggled for a moment, adjusting himself on the sandy earth. “I am at your service, as ever.”

For a second, Gaara just stood there, gaze fixed and fingers numb at the tips. Lee had a way of doing this, of sprinkling words of devotion into casual conversation as if it were nothing. Sucking the air from Gaara’s lungs without even realizing he had done so. How could Gaara ever have doubted that Lee was the only person in the world deserving of the secret places of his past and his heart, when he spoke like that?

“I know,” Gaara said, and his voice came out hoarse.

He had planned to take care of the last of his duties while Lee was relaxing—finding some fodder for the camels, perhaps even walking around the perimeter to check the state of the mother well if Lee was going to nap—but now he couldn’t bring himself to leave. He sat back down in the sand at Lee’s side and curled his feet under him. 

“This is actually pretty comfortable,” Lee remarked, after a long silence punctuated by nothing but the breeze rustling the palm fronds. “Your clothes are nice and cool.” 

Gaara didn’t reply. His hand strayed once more to the bits of skin left exposed in the gaps of wet cloth, stroking meaningless, curling shapes.

“You know, I’ve been thinking.” Lee’s voice was treacle-slow with sleep, his words muffled by sun-warmed skin. “I’d like to make it up to you.”

“Make what up?” 

“You shared a very special piece of yourself with me today, your culture and history. I’d like to return the favor. So I was thinking … maybe we could cook something together?” 

“You know I don’t cook,” Gaara reminded him. 

Why would he, when he liked his meat just as well raw as he did seared? When he spent most nights in his office eating street food from the little bazaar down the road that stayed open late? And when Temari and Kankuro traded off cooking duties on the few nights he made it back home before midnight? Lee’s arrival in Suna had heralded the addition of his own brand of home cooking and a spate of hand-packed bentos delivered to his office midday (to the chagrin of Gaara’s assistant, who kept insisting she had locked and warded the windows only for Lee to sneak through them once more), but even Lee had yet to induce Gaara to pick up a spatula. 

There was simply no need for it. Lee was a surprisingly talented cook for a man who seemed to think it a crime to turn down a meal. Gaara supposed Lee would have had to learn quickly how to make food palatable, given that his own ethics would have required him to eat all his mistakes. 

“It’s never too late to start,” Lee said brightly, accompanied by a turning of his head and a slow blink in Gaara’s direction. He was half-asleep and still talking, wonder that he was. “If you won’t let me teach you to swim, at least let me teach you to cook.” 

“Fine.” Gaara adjusted the rapidly drying garments along Lee’s back and arms, so he wouldn’t burn when he inevitably fell asleep moments from now. “What are we making?” 

“I thought we might start with fried rice.” Lee’s eyes crinkled closed when he beamed, and they did not open again. “It’s a perfect beginner’s dish.”

“Even I know how to make rice,” Gaara replied drily. 

“Then you’re halfway there!” 

Gaara thought to say more, but Lee’s mouth drifted open and a soft snore escaped him. 

Later, he would wake Lee with a gentle hand on the shoulder. Later, he would show him how to toss a senbon to skewer ripe dates to make their lunch. And Lee would hold him up by the waist to pluck the heavy apricots that dangled overhead, and they would press the soft flesh to each other’s lips until the juice ran down their chins. They would fill a bag with olives to carry back to Suna and hold hands while Gaara pointed out the ones that were ready to harvest. 

But for now, Lee was sleeping deeply, content as a lizard sunning on a rock. He had not slept well out in their desert tent—Gaara had felt the waking rumble of his chakra intermittently throughout the night—and now, perhaps, he finally felt safe enough to allow himself to drift. His face was slack and perfectly peaceful, unmarked by stress or worry. 

Gaara stood and, with a last long, fond look to make sure Lee’s skin was fully protected from the elements, went to inspect the rest of the access shafts.

* * *

“What’s this?” 

A week after their return from the Demon Desert found Gaara standing in the doorway to his kitchen, summoned from his home office by Lee’s cries of, “It’s finally time!” 

The kitchen of the Kazekage estate was large, but Gaara used it so rarely for anything more than a pot of tea that it wasn’t particularly well-appointed. Gaara didn’t claim any exhaustive knowledge of the cabinets’ inventory, but he certainly didn’t recall them ever containing obscure, foreign cooking equipment. Nothing like the massive, round-bottomed skillet Lee was setting on one of the burners with a grin. 

“I had Tenten send my wok from my apartment in Konoha!” 

Lee hefted the thing and held it out for Gaara’s inspection as Gaara crossed into the kitchen proper. Gaara glanced at it, unsure what reaction Lee was seeking. He had no idea how to judge the implement Lee was extending to him like a trophy, other than to note it was very large and very deep. 

It also chafed him, slightly, to be reminded of Lee’s Konoha apartment. Lee still held the lease to the place, claiming that it prevented him from imposing on his friends when he made his frequent sojourns to his home village, and that it served as a convenient storage space for the years’ worth of accumulation of training equipment he had yet to ship to Suna. But to Gaara it felt like a sign not of practicality, but of temporality. A guidepost reading, ‘I’m here for now, but I could be gone at any moment, and my life would continue uninterrupted without you.’ 

He bit his tongue at the unkindness. 

“It smells like rice in here,” he said instead. 

“Oh, yes!” Lee set the wok back down with a clatter and went to open the rice cooker. Starchy steam flooded the air. “I thought since you already knew how to do this part, I would get a head start. Can you grab me a big plate? And then there’s an apron for you on that chair.”

Lee nodded his head in the direction of the kitchen table, where a fluorescent orange apron dangled its ties to the stone floor. Lee was wearing its twin already, knotted around his waist in a tidy bow.

“I haven’t even washed my hands yet,” Gaara muttered, but he did as he was told. 

Freshly scrubbed and pink-skinned up to his elbows, he found himself standing at Lee’s side as he heaped rice onto the plate and spread it out with a paddle. 

“I think you undercooked it,” he said. “It looks dry.”

“You should have told me you were a gourmet chef!” The twinkle in Lee’s eye when he looked over his shoulder gave away his amusement entirely. “It has to be dry, or we’ll end up with a wok full of congee.”

Gaara’s nose wrinkled instinctively. He despised all slippery, gooey textured foods, anything he couldn’t sink his teeth into properly. 

“Don’t worry.” Lee bent down and pecked him on the tip of his nose. “You’ll like this, I promise. I think it has three different meats?”

That piqued Gaara’s interest.

“I did have to make some substitutions, though. You don’t have a lot of the ingredients in your market here.” 

He set the rice aside and guided Gaara to the countertop by the range. He’d pulled out the massive cutting board that Kankuro only used when he was cooking for a festival day, and behind it lay a spread of ingredients all the names of which Gaara could not begin to recall, some labeled in a narrow script that only superficially resembled the characters of Shinobi Common. 

“Oh, well,” Lee sighed. “As long as it tastes good, right?” He picked up a large knife and passed it to Gaara handle-first. “Now, how good are your knife skills when you don’t cheat with the sand?”

* * *

Not good at all, the answer turned out to be. 

After Gaara’s third butchered attempt at chopping the pork into cubes, Lee came to stand behind him. 

“Let’s try it this way.” 

Long arms bracketed Gaara’s shoulders; a bandaged hand settled on the back of his wrist. 

“Don’t hold it like a kunai,” Lee murmured, rearranging Gaara’s fingers on the knife handle, “hold it more like a pen.” 

“This is how I hold a pen.” 

Out of the corner of his eye, he caught the edges of Lee’s grimace. Gaara had never claimed to have excellent penmanship. At times his scrawl was so indecipherable that the various chuunin would compete to see who could understand the largest chunk of a particularly long missive. There was even a dedicated scribe who took down dictation of particularly important treatises and correspondence on his behalf. 

“Never mind the comparison,” Lee said gently. “Just hold it like this. Now rock the blade rhythmically, nice and slow.” 

His hand set a steady pace guiding Gaara’s wrist, and Gaara struggled against his every instinct to focus on the precision of his knife cuts instead of on the feeling of Lee’s bicep flexing against his shoulder, the shift of warm muscle against his back, how easily and fluidly Lee arranged Gaara’s body to his liking. 

“You still haven’t told me what exactly it is we’re making,” Gaara said, as the pork was scraped into a bowl and replaced on the cutting board with the crisp white discs Gaara recognized as bamboo shoots. 

“Oh!” Lee’s breath disturbed the hair behind Gaara’s ear. “It’s just called chao fan. There’s a bunch of different types, but I don’t think this is any particular recipe. It’s … one of the only things I remember my papa ever cooking.” 

His voice had gone curiously soft; his hand on the knife slowed to a snail’s pace. 

“Auntie used to make it, too, but it never quite tasted as good as I remember Papa’s being.” 

“That’s because your aunt is a harridan,” Gaara blurted, unable to stop himself. 

Lee’s posture stiffened along Gaara’s back. 

“That is uncharitable.” 

“But true,” Gaara insisted. 

Lee returned his attention to the chopping of the food with a hum, but said nothing more. The topic of Lee’s family was another that ended more often in disagreement than reconciliation. Gaara had some time ago decided he would not attempt to dictate the terms of Lee’s relationship with them, but neither would he hold his tongue when it came to his opinion on how they’d treated Lee. 

He turned his head to bump his forehead gently against Lee’s chin. 

“Temari says food tastes best when it’s made with love.” He offered the interpretation though Lee had not asked for it. 

Lee’s lips curved in a smile, exposing the dimple in the pit of his cheek. Gaara particularly enjoyed its appearance; for all that Lee smiled, his dimples were a rare sight indeed, and often only exposed when Lee was feeling some particularly tender emotion. 

“Well, then,” Lee whispered around his smile, “this meal should be especially delicious.” 

Gaara settled back into the warmth of Lee’s half-embrace, letting his mind drift as Lee piloted his body around the kitchen, chattering explanation all the while—the names of ingredients, the proper technique for their preparation, their alternate uses. The dimple stayed fixed on Lee’s cheek throughout, and Gaara tracked its movement like a ship drawn into the orbit of a whirlpool. 

Gaara was probably supposed to be the one with a secret, softer side, for all his blunt exterior and swirling, bloody rumors, but the fact was that he was much _less_ complex than people gave him credit for. To know enough of his past was to know him almost entirely, the brands that his life had left on his personality and thought patterns just as obvious as the mark he’d scarred into his own forehead. 

Lee, on the other hand … he wore his heart on his sleeve, that much was true, but his _soul_ … that bit was private. A carefully guarded secret, rarely exposed. Gaara liked to think he caught a glimpse of it, though, just now, peeking over his shoulder to spy the soft-edged delight on Lee’s features. Lee was at ease here, relaxed. There were no tensed muscles or challenging scowls, no shouted encouragements or brassy grins. There was only the slowest creep of the smile broadening on his face, until the dimple on his cheek was so deep Gaara could drown in it, a crinkle of the crows’ feet that were just starting to spring up at the corners of his wide, dark eyes. 

Lee caught Gaara’s gaze and went suddenly bright. That little hint of warmth on his features burst into a sunbeam. It felt like staring directly at a solar flare, so blinding that Gaara had to look away, his hand slipping on the handle of the sizzling wok. 

Lee’s hand caught him before the sand did. 

“Careful, there!” he chided. “You’ll get burned!” 

Gaara scowled as Lee nudged him out of the way to command the pan and its plumes of steam. 

“It’s dangerous to get distracted when the stove is on!” 

Lee’s dimple had vanished into the pursed line of his frown. Gaara frowned right back, making a show of storing his sand back in his gourd to prove how very little danger he’d been in just now. 

“I thought you _liked_ a little danger.” The topic breached the surface of Gaara’s mind like a man gasping his dying breath out of water, uncontrolled and desperate. He stared Lee down with eyes full of challenge. 

“For me, sure!” Lee seemed not to have noticed Gaara’s bristling, focused on emptying the rice from the wok into a serving bowl. “But not for you.” 

Lee began to cross the kitchen, making for the cabinet with the dinner plates in it, but Gaara’s hand on his arm stopped him. 

“I thought that was why you wanted me,” Gaara said slowly, studying Lee’s bewildered face. “That’s why you chose me, because you like danger.” 

“That’s … “ The pucker of Lee’s frown deepened. “Do you really think that’s the only reason? That I’m getting some adrenaline rush off this?” 

Gaara relented to the pressure of Lee’s forward motion, allowing him to pass through the kitchen to gather their plates and chopsticks. 

“I’m not some pet you can keep and placate,” Gaara told the strong line of Lee’s back. “You can’t _tame_ me.” 

Lee handed him a steaming plate of rice and gestured towards the table. 

“I wouldn’t want to even if I could,” he replied simply, pulling out a cushion for Gaara to sit.

Gaara sat in it with a murmured thanks, before realizing it probably would have strengthened the position of his argument to insist on doing it himself. Lee tugged him up to the table neatly and tucked a napkin into Gaara’s collar before he could raise his voice to protest. 

“I like you wild as you are,” Lee said, sitting down on the cushion nearest Gaara. Not the one across from him, as would have been proper, but the one right next to him, so close that their ankles touched between the table’s short legs. “But that’s not why I want to be with you.”

“What is it then?” Gaara pressed. Steam rose up from the plates in front of them and made the whole room hazy. “What’s your reason?” 

“Because …” Lee chewed his lower lip. “Because you’re my most precious person. The most important part of me. I want to protect you and keep you safe.” 

Gaara had thought that he understood the whys and wherefores of Lee’s infatuation, the magnetism that drew him into the web of Gaara’s life like an unwitting fly into a spider’s home. This was not the first time Lee had called him this, but never before had it felt like drowning, like falling down a well of confusion, the white circle of the light of understanding disappearing as he submerged. He had heard Lee’s words many times before, but tonight was the first night he’d truly _listened_ to them. 

Something squeezed in him—not just his heart, but his whole body. Like being pulled up onto dry land by a rescuer’s strong arms, only for that unexpected embrace to be betrayed by the whisper of an assassin’s knife at his throat.

“There is no keeping me safe, Lee,” said Gaara. “The life of a shinobi is one of inherent risk, the life of a Kage even moreso. The most unsafe thing I could possibly do is to keep on living.” 

Something broke behind Lee’s eyes. His frown softened into something more tender than fresh bruises, spilled across his face like blood from a beating heart. He reached out and took Gaara’s hand, stroking one bandaged thumb over the jut of Gaara’s wristbone.

“I know that,” he said, voice rough. “I _know_. But sometimes I wish … I wish there was more that I could do … more that I could _be_ for you.” 

And now it was Gaara’s turn to fall apart, to crack his chest and lay his heart right next to Lee’s on the tabletop. 

“More than what?” he whispered, his eyes searching the bottomless pool of Lee’s. “You’re here. That’s enough. That’s more than enough. It’s … more than I could have ever expected.”

Lee had _chosen_ Gaara; that was the sum of it. He had made his home here, under Gaara’s roof, had chosen to sleep and cook and bathe here, had shed his old life like a snakeskin for the new one they were slowly building together. That sort of affection, that sort of mutuality, it was more than Gaara could have ever dreamed of, when he was small and empty and alone. What more did Lee think Gaara might want from him? 

“I just wish …” Lee’s mouth made a thin line, the skin of its corners pink from chewing. “I wish I could do more than just throw down my life for you.” 

“I don’t want you to do that,” Gaara said quickly. “Don’t act like I’m worth more than you are.” 

“It’s not about worth. I would do it regardless.”

Lee smiled at him, and there was no hint of sadness there, no martyrdom or self-sacrifice. No, his eyes spoke only of determination, deeper than ancient aquifers and wider than the barrenness of the Demon Desert, a devotion that no amount of Gaara’s reasoned arguments would breach. 

In his wrist, Gaara’s heart beat and beat and beat. The pulse of Lee’s thumb responded in perfect tempo. 

“I know,” Gaara said, though he could not speak all the things he knew. “I know.” 

Lee would die for him, and he would do it over and over again if he could. Just as Gaara had once died for Suna. Just as Gaara now knew he would die, too, for Lee. 

Lee pressed a kiss to the back of Gaara’s knuckles, an echo of a long-ago sleep-bewitched prayer. 

“I only say it because I love you.”

“I love you, too,” Gaara whispered. 

He stared at their joined hands until Lee picked up his chopsticks in the other hand and poked at him. 

“We should eat before the food gets cold,” he said, still smiling. 

They lifted their first bites to their mouths simultaneously.

And Gaara’s sister had been right. The food tasted better for the love cooked into it.

**Author's Note:**

> [Ksour](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ksar) (singular _ksar_ ) are fortified adobe structures mostly found in North Africa that are made up of granaries and an attached village. 
> 
> [Foggara](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qanat) are underground aqueducts found in arid regions, also known as Qanats.
> 
> (And yes, the camels are named Khaki and Cous(cous). I regret nothing.)


End file.
